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Well, I love Christmas in general, but stories set in country houses with decorated trees, and snow outside, and the smells of baking and the sounds of carols…all of that goes so beautifully with knives and poisons, doesn’t it?

Christmas in its nature is a solstice celebration, an assertion of light in the darkness. And in the hemisphere of mystery tales, Christmas stories are a touch of darkness against the light. Family, gifts, happy children, rich food….and death.

Or at least crime, of some kind. And in the case of a very young Mary Russell, Christmas is an ideal time to pick up criminal tips and a piece of equipment that will become iconic of her in her later memoirs: her throwing knife.

“Mary’s Christmas” is that tale of young Mary and her rascally Uncle Jake, which is in the collection Mary Russell’s War. Last year, Team LRK did an illustrated version of the story, and this year my publishers are giving it away. It’s structured as a sweepstakes, but the story will drop into your in-box on the 20th. Just in time to give you a touch of light in your darkness. The giveaway is here. Enjoy!

Say, would you like a little something to help nudge you into that old holiday spirit? What about a copy of Mary’s Christmas?

This is a pdf to download, so you can print it off, use it to create an illuminated manuscript, send it to a friend, you name it. Plus, this is an all-new illustrated version, which the original was not, so that’s fun too.

The download is here. May Mary’s tale make you just a little bit merrier.

As BookBub may have told you, there’s a special deal on the US e-book of Mary Russell’s War—

As you probably know, Russell’s War would be an ideal present for this time of year since there are two, yes two, Christmas stories. One is about Russell’s childhood memories, and the other is all the way up in 1925—which, yes, is slightly ahead of where the books themselves take you. So, spoiler: Russell and Holmes don’t die in the remainder of 1925. Probably.

if you snatch at one soon, you’ll get a copy signed by Les as well, since he did the introduction. And I’ll drop in to sign at Bookshop Santa Cruz tomorrow, so if you hurry, they’ll put one aside for you.

This is the first widely distributed print appearance of many of the Russell short stories, including “Mary’s Christmas,” “Marriage of Mary Russell,” and the all-new “Stately Holmes.” And new editions of others, including “Mary Russell’s War.”

The stories are:

Mary’s Christmas

Mary Russell’s War

Beekeeping for Beginners

Mrs Hudson’s Case

The Marriage of Mary Russell

Birth of a Green Man

A Venomous Death

My Story

A Case in Correspondence

Stately Holmes

My whole team went to a tremendous amount of work getting these into print form for you, and I’m very, very happy with how the project turned out. I hope you enjoy it.

Two weeks from today, on Feb 1, a number of my e-short stories will be coming down, vanishing, going underground (except, of course, if they’re already on your reader.) These stories won’t be for sale again until Random House publishes my collection of Russell & Holmes tales in October (as an ebook, though possibly, eventually, as a print book as well. We don’t have a contract for that yet.)

Today’s Dreaming Spies Countdown post is a new set of images on Pinterest: the Japan sojourn of Russell & Holmes, over here.Now, back to our regular Monday programming of Russell’s War:

2 February 1915

Thursday will mark the six month point of this War that was supposed to be over by Christmas. In California, the fighting in Europe is but a distant rumour, while here in Sussex—

But I get ahead of myself.

On Tuesday morning, I left the house in London without being noticed (which required that I make a small diversion in the garden at back, but I am sure nothing serious was burnt) and travelled to Victoria Station. There I bought a ticket for Eastbourne (since there were times even before the disruption caused by War when trains would neglect to stop at the closer station to my home) and was told that the delay would probably not be more than a couple of hours. I settled into the waiting area with my book, and indeed, it was not much more than two hours. As it did not take us much more than twice the normal time to reach the town.

Mr Mason was still waiting, as I had known he would be. Had the Kaiser’s troops crossed the Channel and invaded the town—had Zeppelins flattened everything from the Pier to Town Hall—he would still have contrived to find and claim me.

Not that he was pleased to see me, exactly. He took my valise with as ill grace as he could manage, indicating just what he thought of my decision to come to the coast, and unaccompanied at that. It took me most of the trip home before I could distract him from disapproval, by earnest enquiries into the farm, and the horses, and the life of the village as a whole.

I will admit, I nearly broke down when I walked into the kitchen. Mrs Mark, the neighbouring lady whom Mother depended on both while we were in residence and when we were away, had lit the fires and filled the pantry (as well she could considering the shortages). I stood there in the warmth and the fragrance of her new-baked bread, and when she came over to give me a hug, it was all I could do to keep the tears from running down my face.

Mrs Mark tutted and fussed and made haste to supply me with tea and food, which returned the world to some stability, since I had neither eaten nor drunk since morning. She showed me three times where everything was, exclaimed four times at how grown up I was, scolded me for my thinness five times, and on the sixth recitation of how good it was to see me, I gently ushered her towards the door and told her that I would see her tomorrow, and that no (for the fourth time) there was no need to send someone over to stay in the house until my aunt arrived.

Then I went through much the same ritual with Mr Mason—who says I am to call him Patrick: I think I remind him of Mother—before finally, the door shut behind my visitors, and I was alone in the house.

In my house.

I walked through all of the well-loved spaces of my past. Dining room, with its echoes of conversation. Sitting room, where we had read aloud and played cards. The hallway with its umbrella stand and empty hat-rack. I turned to the stairs, and climbed them to the bedrooms. Everything smelled clean, not at all like a house that had been closed for three years*. My bed, looking very small, had been made up. A doll that I had not played with since I was five had been placed on the pillow, however, there was also a small crystal vase on the table containing three hellebores: Mother had treasured her garden’s winter flowers, exclaiming with glee at any hellebores or forsythia that opened in time for our Christmas table. The bath down the hall had been laid with fresh towels and a bar of my mother’s favourite scented soap. My brother’s room was next; its shelves held toys and books that he had outgrown long before he died. Then the next room…

It took me some minutes to turn the doorknob. When I stepped inside, although the air smelt the same as all of the other rooms, there was some angle of light through the curtains, some atomic trace of the two that had shared the bed, some imperceptible touch that loosed the tears flow at last.

We had all been in the habit of leaving certain clothing behind, here in Sussex, when we returned to London or America. Even though we had not known that last time when or even if we should return, nonetheless we had walked away from garments we did not think we would wear other than here, and Mrs Mark had been no more willing to clear those away then she had my brother’s books or my childhood doll.

The wooden chest at the foot of their bed gave out a cloud of the remembered cedar smell when I opened its heavy lid. Inside lay two neatly folded stacks of country wear, Mother’s on the right, Father’s beside it. I could not imagine pulling on her clothing, not yet, but my arm reached out for a tweed jacket that was older than I. My thumb found the small mend in the hem from when he had neglected to put out his pipe before dropping it into his pocket. Levi had noticed the smoke, and had laughed uproariously at Father’s antics.

I put the jacket on. To my astonishment, other than the breadth of its torso, it very nearly fit, being only slightly long at the wrist. I closed the cedar chest, and went back downstairs, letting myself out into the garden.

Evening was falling. Everything was very still. My ears did not know what to do with the lack of noise, after so many weeks—months—without silence. The convalescent hospital had never been truly quiet, and had been followed with the days of train, then Boston, and another train and then the rhythm of the ship’s engines throbbing in the bones, and of course London never slept, but here…

The only thing I could hear was what I thought was my own pulse. However, listening more carefully, I decided it was external: the constant beat of waves against the chalk cliffs, five or six miles off. I could not remember noticing that noise before, but then, the recent days of gales and heavy storm was only now dying away. And in any event, how often had I, as a child, sat here in the garden at night? Mother did. I’d never realised why.

I lay that night in my childhood bed, feet pressed past its end, hearing only the old familiar creaks of the house. I slept eventually, and in the morning, before Mrs Mark or Mr Mason—Patrick—could come to see how I was, I bundled into my father’s tweed jacket and then his greatcoat, which I found in the niche near the front door (even the moths couldn’t make much inroads into its harsh wool). I tucked my plaits into a cap that had been given my brother by an uncle who misjudged the size of his head, and set off across the Downs for the Channel.

It was cold but marvellously clear after the recent storms and the stinking fogs of London. A few farmers were out, but at a distance, and I saw only two motorcars when I crossed the main road. For the most part, it was me and the sheep.

The white chalk headlands due south of my house rise and fall in a series of precipitous cliffs, the tallest of which is Beachy Head, a popular site of final decision for spurned lovers and the otherwise despairing. Today, peering cautiously over the edge, I was relieved to see nothing interrupting the stretch of clean shingle beach below but the lighthouse. The tide was going out, as revealed by the gleaming wet border a few feet above the lapping water, and last night’s waves had died away to nothing.

I walked back from the edge—this is a cliff, after all, which means bits fall off all the time, particularly following a heavy beating from the waves. I settled onto a tussock with the coat wrapped around me. The Channel was calm, even blue, with a few boats off in the distance. So utterly deceptive.

The Germans had Unterseeboots, what the papers called U-boats. I knew they were out there, hunting beneath that innocent blue surface. Even now, there could be a periscope coming free of the water, turning about, seeing the cliff, noticing a figure seated atop the cliff…

I shuddered and got quickly to my feet, turning to walk the nearly invisible path worn by summer ramblers. If the Kaiser decided to launch an attack on England, where would his men choose? His Zeppelin had flown over Norfolk, but a sea crossing of actual troops? If he could take France, or at least its northern coast, then any invasion would be somewhere here. Hastings, site of a previous invader’s foothold, was less than twenty miles away.

Would this summer find a return of peacetime rambling to this part of the world, or would the War be dragging on to a second August? Perhaps the Germans would already be here, and a new generation of ramblers would speak a language other than English? No, that was not possible. If invasion were threatened, the citizens of England would scramble across the countryside like ants, armed with old shotguns and pitchforks, rallying to throw the invaders off the white cliffs and fill the shingle below with their bodies. Not that shotguns and pitchforks could do much good against the sorts of guns the—

At that thought, my steps slowed to a halt. I heeled around to face the open view, and listened hard, mouth slightly dropped. That same pulse, sounding in my ears. Only it was not a pulse. What I had heard the night before, what I heard again now, came not from within my own body. Nor did it rise from the Beachy Head cliffs, where—oh, dullard that you are, Mary!—the shingle above the retreating tide was dry as could be.

That sound reached my ears from a hundred miles away. That sound was the ceaseless, massive throb of an artillery barrage.

In a patch of hell on the other side of that calm blue water, boys not much older than I lay dying into the French earth.

I was in my local Bookshop Santa Cruz the other day when the owner came up to me to say, Thank you, for saving our day. Seems that last Thursday when I went in to sign their copies of “Mary’s Christmas”was the day that Stormageddon descended on Northern California, and hanging around book stores was pretty far down the to-do list of most Santa Cruzians: the store was populated by the staff, and me. Which meant that their day’s take would have been illustrated by a really deep hole, except for you guys. All of you who ordered a copy of this pricey little paperback for me to sign? They filled the order that day, and your dollars saved them from a very ugly little blip to worry their accountant. So, she thanked me.

And I, in turn, thank you. For supporting my local bookstore, on a day when it made a lot of difference to them, and to me.

I’m going by there today to sign another stack, feel free to order if you like, from Bookshop or (especially if you’re outside the US) from the Poisoned Pen.

So, I fought my way through storm and flood and fallen branches (yeah, it is indeed raining here in drought-land, and raining hard—really hard) risking life and limb and wet shoes JUST FOR YOU, making my way to Bookshop Santa Cruz (and back) where I signed a stack of the now-in-print short story, “Mary’s Christmas”

that they just got in from the printers. If you haven’t already, you can order one of these signed babies (they really are cute) from Bookshop, here, or from Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale (where they should arrive next week) here.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse of a very young Miss Russell, her varied skills, and a previously unknown (to us) character in her life, Uncle Jake.

–is now available in a print version! My local shrine to print wisdom, Bookshop Santa Cruz, can sell you this nice little booklet (with my signature and an inscription, if you like) here.

It begins one winter’s evening in late 1921 or 1922 when the two are seated by their fire, sharing stories about the unexplored portions of their past. Naturally, a person might expect the older Holmes to have a large collection of these—but tonight it is Russell who astonishes her husband with news of a previously unknown, even unsuspected, relation.

I have been neglecting this Journal in recent weeks. Nonetheless, it appears that my life will continue, and Dr. Ginsberg feels that some weekly notation might be of use in the restoration of normal thought. So I shall resume.

My family is dead. I, however, am alive. And following the increasing number of visitors and letters who insist that I have a future, I admit that plans for it must be made.

I am no longer in the hospital, but lodged now in a building that from the outside might look like a private residence, along with four other unfortunates who have 1) survived their injuries and 2) lack the resources for returning to a family’s care. The staff gently prods us until we move our bodies about the grounds, gently pesters us until we have eaten food from our plates, and gently persists in finding things that might restore an interest in our surroundings. All this meek compassion and softhearted torment makes me want to curse aloud and crash some pans around.

However, they are right, my life will be in limbo until I begin to cope with the mounting demands. Hence, I have agreed to see one or two visitors a day, and to work my way through the intimidating pile of condolence letters.

The visitors have proven trying, although fortunately my attending nurses here remain in hearing, and intervene to send the more emotional guests on their way, with many sympathetic pats. But the letters are if anything more difficult, since most were written soon after the news reached the writer, when the shock was raw and no thought of lessening the impact on the survivor had yet occurred to them.

There is an old woman assigned to help with things such as correspondence, and it would appear that she has seen it all before. After a few days, despite making little impact on the depth of the pile, I began to feel as if the entire world mourned the loss of my parents. My elderly helper has taken to reading the letters first, setting a few of them aside for later consideration.

I felt ashamed at this cowardice, but until recently, my strength has only permitted so many trials.

Then today, after she left me for my period of afternoon rest (when normally I fall asleep like a small child) I found my eyes resting on the small pile she had set aside. They rebuked me, this collection of letters from those who had loved my mother and my father. So after a time, I got up and brought them back to bed to read.

And there it was, the one I had been wondering about, the one I had been hoping for since the day I first woke up in my hospital bed, the only one that really mattered. The words were few, but the bold strokes of his pen might have been dipped in blood, for the agony they imparted:

Mary, Mary, my favoritest Mary. Oh, child, my heart has been ripped from its chest. If I’d thought it would not merely compound your grief, you would wake to see me standing at your bedside, instead of reading this.

It is your choice: if you want me there, however briefly, I will come. You know how to reach me.

The note was not signed, but there was no need. Although in case I had lost my mind—or my vision, necessitating other eyes but mine on these letters—the paper was folded around two playing cards: an eight of hearts, and a jack of spades.

No: I did not need him to come and stand beside my bed, especially since I suspected—knew, even—that the additional “grief” to which he referred would be his immediate arrest for some crime or another.

It was enough to know that Uncle Jake was thinking of me.

* * *

Mary Russell has an Uncle? Well, so it would appear. In fact, there’s now a story about him, on Kindleor on other platforms here. You can read a sample of it, to tease your palate. And yes, we’ll even try for a printed version with this one…perhaps by Christmas?